Similar conversations have been taking place at major universities around the world, as dozens - 74, at the last count - rush to sign up. Science, engineering and technology courses have been in the vanguard of the movement, but offerings in management, humanities and the arts are growing in popularity (see 'MOOCs rising'). "In 25 years of observing higher education, I've never seen anything move this fast," says Mitchell Stevens, a sociologist at Stanford and one of the leaders of an ongoing, campus-wide discussion series known as Education's Digital Future.

Good MOOC's, in their view, foreground and sustain the social dimension of learning and active practices, i.e., knowledge production rather than knowledge consumption. To a limited extent, certain experiments in MOOC's that foreground social media participation over "content mastery" realize some of the ideals of Siemen and Downes.

The shock is that the methods used by these hugely successful courses are little changed from the dark ages. If you think I'm being a critical outsider, then you might like to know that one of the leading lights in the movement, Peter Norvig, agrees with me. He even makes a joke in his recent Ted Talk that lectures in MOOCs are just like the 16th century monastic lecture theaters complete with the guy at the back sleeping!

khamon- probably an accurate assessment of non-connectivist MOOCs, the kind I do not attend.

It is envisaged that learning is enhanced by four major types of activity:1) aggregation, access to and collection of a wide variety of resources to read, watch, or play; 2) relation, after reading, watching, or listening to some content, the learner might reflect and relate it to what he or she already knows or to earlier experiences; 3) creation, after this reflection and sense-making process, learners might create something of their own (i.e., a blog post, an account with a social bookmarking site, a new entry in a Moodle discussion) using any service on the Internet, such as Flickr, Second Life, Yahoo Groups, Facebook, YouTube, iGoogle, NetVibes, etc.; 4) sharing, learners might share their work with others on the network. This participation in activities is seen to be vital to learning.

A major concern is that because people need to aggregate information and resources autonomously, either by (RSS) feeds or through the use of human filters, they require a high level of critical analysis skills to be able to do so effectively.

What type of structure might then aid learners in overcoming the aforementioned challenges? What can be done to engage learners in critical learning on an open network? Carroll, Kop, and Woodward (2008) see as the crux to engaging learners in an online environment the creation of a place where people feel comfortable, trusted, and valued. The task would be to move toward a space that aggregates content and to imagine it as a community, a place where dialogue happens, where people feel comfortable and where interactions and content can be easily accessed and engaged with, a place where the personal meets the social with the specific purpose of learning.

The National Research Council of Canada’s Institute for Information Technology is currently engaged in the research and development of such a structure, a PLE named Plearn,

Requirements of a MOOC for learners and a little for a platform that can support learners. Experiences with two previous MOOCs, both for teachers. (Needed: research on MOOCs for non-educational topics)

Our
goal by engaging educators in digitally-connected, asynchronous forms of
collaborative learning was that they would gain an organic, authentic understanding
of what we (NML) mean by "participatory culture" - and thereby adopt the value
of its practices and bring them to their students and
districts.

We originally intended the course to utilize our existing public Ning community as a way to offer transparency to this learning process and allow others in the NML community to tap in and learn from what the early adopters were doing. Though each of them was equipped to share a plethora of expertise and experience that would have undoubtedly been valued by the larger community, the idea of "failing in public" overrode their desire to contribute.

In classrooms, the way they currently
stand in most places, the teacher is still the distributor of all knowledge,
and students acquire and "bank" this information as valuable. Therefore a
teacher's expertise, while no one would ask this be stripped from a learning scenario,
remains the main asset in the student-teacher equation.

the experience of exploring your own pedagogy in ways
that challenge, perhaps, some of your most trusted and practiced ways of
teaching, and that mandates an openness and willingness to explore what failure
might look like in order to rebuild a learning environment that addresses the
shifts necessary for a new wave of learning - is, well, overwhelming.